aining its popularity under the former name, SquareUp Inc., the Block company has a long history in the financial industry. Back in 2009, two entrepreneurs,
Jim McKelvey and Jack Dorsey wanted to achieve their dream of developing an impressive technology that was capable of gathering different merchant services and mobile payments into just one service. So, they created the SquareUp company, which in 2021 changed its name to Block Financial, Inc. in order to seek more opportunities to grow in the industry.
What is Block, Inc.?
Block (formerly SquareUp) represents a company that provides financial services for small businesses such as credit card payments, tracking sales and inventory, or helping them to obtain financing.
In the principal product line, Block Inc. includes also the Cash App, which is globally known for its focus on allowing users to send and receive money free of additional charges directly from the mobile app. Also, Block's financial product line includes the Point-of-Sale created especially for small businesses to let them process payments directly from their smartphones, and TIDAL, which represents a streaming service based on a monthly subscription.
Cash App was first introduced for public use in 2014, in order to make peer-to-peer payments more convenient. Before launching this impressive technology, Square Inc. was processing more than $2 billion of payments per year, at a valuation of $240 million, so the Cash App represented a way to make this technology known to everyone. After the CashApp launch, in 2015, the company managed to launch a public offering of $9 per share which then valued the company at $2.8 billion.
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It seems that CashApp really has popularity among users, because 3 years later, in 2018, this app has been able to surpass Venmo and PayPal in Apple Store number of downloads.
From 2018 to now, the Block Inc. company has made a lot of purchases to widen its industry dominance. In the products line the company added Stitch, a commercial operations management software, a web design company called Weebly, and Tidal, the music streaming service.
What services does Block Financial exactly offer?
As mentioned above, Block Inc. offers various services and products for small businesses in order to help them with all sales transactions, inventory management, and other services.
The charges for traditional payment services can increase up to 2.60% of the sale price with an additional 10 cents for transactions that are made through swipe, insert, or tap. On the other hand, for the manually keyed-in transactions, the company charges 3.5% of the sale price with an additional 15 cents per transaction.
With many useful products and services for businesses, Block Inc. (formerly Square) managed to become one of the most used services globally. If you have a small business and you don’t currently use Block Inc. services, it’s time to consider the implementation of a future service in your daily business.
